My worlds are collapsing, my production is plateauing, my foundations keep fluctuating and wanting to go offline completely. Is this a game flaw or feature? I find it intensely useless of a response when my fleet attacks another fleet and thy all become destroyed for not fire one shot. What sort of sorcery is that? I have read through bugs, but I have not seen any mention of these.

The fleet that was lost was a Minotaur fleet of about 50,000 and they all were destroyed, nearly. They were fighting a mixed fleet of Victory-class, Defiance-class, and Sirus-class Starships. Does anyone know what could have gone wrong?

I have been playing with the percentages of the trade hub that I have built. But nothing seems to work. I have so many worlds that are not receiving enough supplies that I lost one production world to rebellion while AFK (ooo jargon ). How are y'all using so many trade hubs to produce so many things?
There is no reading on these things as of yet. Please make some by responding to me. It will please the Scientists.
Thank you very kindly,

L.W., Windsor

The H in H2O is Hexacarbide. The H in Hexacarbide is Hexacarbide. Heaven is made out of Hexacarbide!!!

Hexacarbide is more rare a gem than first believed. Expansion has been necessary over the cycles, and has gone well. With the opening of the West for colonization, expansion of the HIC is growing at a good pace. Large deposits were found on multiple worlds. However, with the depletion of Bw Object, Metallic Bromide, Delta Carinae One, and others, we have needed to turn our concentrations on much more difficult sectors. Windsor exploratory teams have pushed into the regions once held by Pandastan, which are heavily fortified. Technological progress has been spurred by such offensive barbarians. Conquest is moving along at an acceptable pace though. The Western Colonies were quite fruitless at first, but it appears there are even larger reserves of Hexacarbide than our futurists predicted. It isn't that they died for their lack of accuracy, but they did lose half of their future reserves. A heavy hand is sometimes needed in days of discontentment.

Empire Report:

Fighting has been heavy along the frontiers. The old Pandastan worlds are not giving in to the way of Windsor easily. So we have been forced to create monuments from their bones and boots, paid for by their worn out backs. Worlds long believed to be loyal have undergone eruptions of rebel propaganda. I have been assured by local scientists they are only local rebellions and nothing to get too worked up over. While dissension is smashed one area, new worlds that need to be excavated are being discovered. Industry is is doing well overall, but supply issues within the cluster trade sector are causing deficiencies. Overall, world production is going well as efficiency increases daily.

Colony Project Report:

Hexacarbide Colony is fully established and the link with the main empire is currently under fortification restrictions. The civilians appear to agree. Exploration of Hexacarbide has resulted in vast reserves being discovered. We look forward to bringing order to the barbaric worlds with sophisticated miners equipment and resources necessary to extract as much Hexacarbide as possible.

It is a good time to serve in the empire of Windsor.

L.W., Windsor

The H in H2O is Hexacarbide. The H in Hexacarbide is Hexacarbide. Heaven is made out of Hexacarbide!!!

Looks like Imperator already covered the economy side pretty well before I could finish my drunken late night draft, but I'll have a go at explaining the Minotaur thing.

So, with your Minotaur fleet, I can't really say for sure but Victories, although a lowtech star cruiser, are still very powerful and one of the hard counters to Minotaurs. Minotaurs can be killed by a single hit from a Victory's missile (160 armor vs 320 damage) but a Minotaur would need to hit a Victory a minimum of 50 times (64 damage vs 3200 armor) to kill it. A Victory also has 10 more range (25 vs 10) than Minotaurs so they basically get some free shots on you before the Minotaurs can move to engagement range. We don't have the hard numbers for Era 3 yet (current game) but I don't find it hard to believe from the stats alone that 10-20k Victories wiped 50k Minotaurs before they got a shot off. Gunships vs Starcruisers is a bit like cavalry attacking a fortress with no siege equipment or missile weapon support.

Also, would you mind posting your Imperial updates in the Imperial Propaganda News Bulletin thread? It's always great when more empires do them and it's nice to have them all in one place to slowly build a history of the galaxy from different perspectives.

Conclusion: starcruiser defense counters gunships except in the case where their firepower can be redirected.

I should make a quick combat strategy guide...

I disagree with your conclusion.

I'm going to ramble about converted supply-chain inclusive Work Unit costs for a moment. These are not a perfect metric of fleet cost because they do not consider attrition (in practice the SCI WU cost of small units is higher because their attrition rate is higher, so maintaining a fleet-in-being of any given size will be more expensive than maintaining a capital ship fleet) but they are the best metric for comparing fleets that we have so far. Also I am using "major" deposits instead of "abundant" deposits; the numbers would be a little different if all raw materials are drawn from "abundant" deposits. That said:

PHASE 2: Attacker has 429m WU. I am not considering Helions because I don't know how many were brought. Defender has 782m WU.
Results: Attacker loses at least 337m WU. Defender loses 71m WU. Defender had 80% more WU. Because the attacking fleet automatically withdraws, an attacking fleet will rarely (never?) be comprehensively annihilated.

Phase II saw a slightly weaker Minotaur fleet attacking a fleet that was exactly twice as strong as the defender in Phase I.

The only conclusion I can draw from these two combats is the effect of WUs. More WUs = win. If Phase I had been repeated without Helions against an identical defender, then an interesting comparison could be made.

Oh, yes I do suppose these work units might be a better metric to test which units perform best. We were going with matching the space forces rating of the two fleets in the first test (from memory it was around 868k vs 1M), and seeing how the Minotaur/Helion combo performed so well then doubled the defending fleet's strength to 2M space forces. I know that rating isn't really accurate, but I used it to make sure the test was at least slightly fair... clearly not! Maybe for the next test we'll calculate the equivalent WU for a starship and gunship fleet first.

Oh, yes I do suppose these work units might be a better metric to test which units perform best. We were going with matching the space forces rating of the two fleets in the first test (from memory it was around 868k vs 1M), and seeing how the Minotaur/Helion combo performed so well then doubled the defending fleet's strength to 2M space forces. I know that rating isn't really accurate, but I used it to make sure the test was at least slightly fair... clearly not! Maybe for the next test we'll calculate the equivalent WU for a starship and gunship fleet first.

What numbers would be fair in this case?

Check out the SCI WU values in the Era 3 Unit tables. In general, when discussing whether a unit counters another unit, I think it makes sense to match up fairly large single-unit fleets with equivalent WU values. The interaction of mixed fleets is a little trickier to draw conclusions about and you pretty much have to use your best judgment.

Hmm, and here I was thinking that Armored Infantry were the most cost effective ground forces. I've never tried a full infantry producing cluster, only Armored Infantry or Exotroops. It should also be even easier than Armored Infantry in extremely resource poor regions.

Hmm, and here I was thinking that Armored Infantry were the most cost effective ground forces. I've never tried a full infantry producing cluster, only Armored Infantry or Exotroops. It should also be even easier than Armored Infantry in extremely resource poor regions.

Since you are contemplaiting it I will tell you about the experment that I ran whenever you were converting Q's empire to the way of the Hegemony.

Not sure if you were even noticing, however, infantry is very effective and very very easy to make. They are like the army ants of this game, small, not very powerful, but you can make so many with so little effort that it makes no sense.. The single greatest issue that I ran into was finding enough transports for them all.

I used about 100 worlds of only producing infantry and was nearing 5 M after about 2 weeks of production. I pretty much had every scenario covered as far as possible ways to make them . Some worlds connected to food and trillum, some to just trillum, some to just food, some were in a huge clusters, some on their own, every type of world and all the tech levels.

The most production that I encountered was single worlds that were Earth-like or Underground at tech 9 or 10, somehow they stayed stable and produced about 60 infantry per min.... there were only two of them though.

Others that were also productive on there own were desert worlds and maybe the nebular world that was a tech 9.

All the others needed to be connected some how. Very productive was 2 earth worlds and 3 trillum worlds and about 10 planets of tech 7, I got about 200K per day from them.

I fought a lot with those, the only time I had issues was an all infantry vs all armored infantry, I usually lost and it really came down to who had the more power, not numbers....

The most useful fighting force that I found when I that iteration was a solid mix of all the ground force types. A great force of Infantry (fodder), slightly smaller force of Imperial Guards (really strong fodder), and for the win about 10,000 armored infantry and a few thousand exo troops. The infantry die first, and they die like helions too, interesting to watch the numbers. It appears while they are dying the the others are still all fighting and you pretty much win.

Moral of the story, if you are going to fight someone with just infantry have a bunch of something else and if he has some millions you will still win .

Not the moral of the story, but what would be neat to try is to have a cluster of infantry, half a cluster of armored infantry, other half of cluster be exo-troop, that should give you a good ratio.

I can't find it now, but someone was talking about now, but I tested a bunch of the ships as well as I could when I was in Crystaline Core's side of the Galaxy in the east.

Adamant pretty much destroy all the planetary defenses, but take horrific losses against anything with missiles. Eldritch will lose trying take a world with laser based defenses, but about 15,000 can take out about 3-4 times their number in missile based defenses. Helions are good for taking on plaentary deffenses if there aren't very much and you have a couple of thousand of them.

Plainly stated. Adamant counter and have just as much power as a Minotaur. Eldritch vs Adamant, eldritch will win with 0 losses as long as their missile defense is not overpowered. Minotaur will shred Eldritch.... Adamant/Minotaur fleet is the best defense against fleets of millions of Eldritch, but they don't really do so well on the attack because Minotaur are so much slower. Very strong defense though. In the case of attack the very heavily defended stronghold planets, Helion/Adamant/Minotaur mix is the best to use, some people may argue it, but.. if you use Eldritch, the laser systems take a big chunk out of your fleet. You can also take out pretty much any standing fleet with that mix and not take too much loss, think you have Minotaur with lasers and something just as strong as Minotaur with missiles.

From what I know about the Undine, they are kind of garbage, but also not, somehow they are not as strong against defenses and seem slower to me. Also, a large Eldritch fleet will counter a fleet of Undine to 100%.

The gorgos and megathere, what I would give to have about 5M a piece...... The only thing that I found to decisively counter the megathere were eldritch, lots and lots and lots of eldritch. I would have like to see Megathere V Megathere, but I never got there. It is difficult to test stuff when the only way you have of getting them is to steal it from another empire.

I wish I had more fighting experience with the gorgos and megathere to let you guys know what I found, but I don't like using that much tech so... no..

Concerning a certain maneuver that steals fleets during a capture............... Hegemony, that is very very difficult to do and is not reliable at all. I was able to do it, because you had no idea what I was doing and my internet happened to be working without any trouble whatsoever. That tick counter is extraordinarily important in that case. The reason I say it is difficult is because STU and I tried it about 5 different times and failed to do so. The reason I knew it was possible was because it actually happens on a fairly regular basis while taking the smaller worlds. If there is a scattered fleet out past 30 megameters and you are force landing your troops they will defect, also, any defenses that not destroyed while taking a planet are converted, so it was only a natural progression of the idea that it could be applied to an enemy fleet. I will leave out the technical operation details, because... that would just be unfair, figure it out for yourselves.

I've discussed fleet capture and fleet transfer in various bug reports dating back to 2016. I think fleet capture is a serious defect in the current combat model, because it makes it paradoxically risky to use fleets to actively defend your planets during an enemy invasion.